In recent years, the number of applications used for, for example, video-on-demand type service including video-conferencing, digital video broadcasting, and video content streaming via the Internet is increasing. These applications are dependent on the transmission of video data. When the video data is transmitted or recorded, a significant amount of data is transmitted through a conventional transmission channel having a limited bandwidth or is recorded into a conventional recording medium having a limited data capacity. In order to transmit the video data through the conventional transmission channel or record the video data into the conventional recording medium, it is absolutely essential to compress or reduce the amount of digital data.
With this being the situation, multiple video coding standards have been developed for video data compression. Examples of the video coding standards include the standards of the International Telecommunication Union Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) specified by “H.26x” and the International Standards Organization/International Electrotechnical Commission (ISO/IEC) specified by “MPEG-x”. Currently, the latest and most advanced video coding standard is presented by the H.264/AVC or MPEG-4 AVC standard (see Non Patent Literatures 1 and 2).
Moreover, various studies are made to improve the coding efficiency by the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard which is a next-generation image coding standard (see Non Patent Literature 3).